My uke-hate I think came to a peak with an ad from last year. I blamed Lily Allen for the mannered vocal unmanneredness, Mumford & Sons for the fucking ukeleles, David Cameron for the ideological basis for it all, but it was AXA Insurance I blamed for that appaling cover of 'Little Things Mean A Lot" and they will therefore burn for all eternity in the skin-flaying flames of hell, alongside Dave, Lily and The Mumfucks. Artists (esp. Britschool-alumni-style priveliged CatPowerfan-feckers like …

The older you get, the more trust becomes important as a listener. As the artists you grew up with grow up with you, you come back to them and hear their growth, hear the changing cadence of what they play, the increased slump in the shoulders, the sharper jut of the jaw. You also hear all the things you love to hear from them, their personality, like an old friend. Sometimes, if you're lucky you can be witness to one of your heroes writing some of the best songs they've ever written. It reassures you that you too can both change and endure. That's precisely what's going on with Thalia Zedek and her newest album Eve.
For those that don't know, Zedek has been one of the most compelling players and singers of the last quarter-century of American music. I say American music. There's something European about Zedek's sensibility as well, something touched by Scriabin and Satie. I say European. What I mean is UNPLACEABLE. First with Live Skull, then with Come (…

Khost's 'Corrosive Shroud' was an ungainly, unpleasant, coruscatingly timely and consequently FEARsome slab of nastiness from 2015. Here they aim at PEAK MAXI-BRUM CARNAGE by giving the tracks to J.K Broadrick and letting him vivisect seven shades of splatterfest shite out of them. The results are the finest noise you'll hear all year, filling you with the kind of tension (as they describe it) 'akin to being in the proximity of a large, unstable machine on the verge of meltdown. If it was a painting it would be about a kilometer wide held up by old, thick metal supports and wires that creak in wind, in parts abstract, in parts quite hard to decipher, and the materials would be oil like and seeping, never quite drying out'.

The thing I don't dig about alot of noise is its lack of purpose. And the fact it makes that purposelessness its point. This isn't happening here. Though never explic…